Is there no end to the prison service’s incompetence?

At the last count, in April of this year, Britain’s failing prison system accommodated 246 prisoners convicted of terrorism-related offences. Not all of them are extremely dangerous but enough are to warrant their dispersal across several high-security prisons.

Last week, The Times newspaper revealed that detailed schematic plans of these high-security prisons had been found on the dark web and could now be in the hands of criminals and terrorists. These schematics could include the precise location of violent extremists, murderers and other serious offenders including those deemed an escape risk.

I remember these blueprints before they were digitised. I spent some time at the headquarters of HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) as a junior governor and staff officer to a national-incident command unit. During a serious incident at a prison, these maps would be used to coordinate the response of the Tornado riot squad. The plans were incredibly detailed, revealing locations of cameras, internal zone fencing, sensors and individual cells.

So if these plans fell into the hands of terrorists or serious organised crime groups, they would find it easy to identify weaknesses in prison security and exploit them. While an escape from custody is probably the least likely consequence of these documents falling into the wrong hands, some of our prisons hold significant national-security risks. The majority of prisoners held for terror offences are ideologically motivated jihadists who believe they have divine permission to kill. Many of these prisoners have not surrendered their hateful beliefs and a fair few thwarted Islamists are among that number.

Those playing down such a threat would do well to remember that in January 2020, a prison officer came within seconds and millimetres of being the first in Britain to be murdered by terrorists. In the supposedly maximum-security HMP Whitemoor, two prisoners, armed with lethal improvised weapons and mock suicide belts, took a prison officer hostage with the intention of killing him. Such prisoners have all day and every day to observe and exploit weaknesses in human and physical security where they are held. We really ought not to be doing their job for them.

The most likely fate of these leaked schematics is that they will be used to more accurately co-ordinate the delivery of contraband to prisoners’ cells. Our prisons are already awash with drugs and there is no sign of the will or resources needed to clamp down. In prisons, 21,000 adults are in treatment for opiate addiction. This is no surprise when you can order any drug to your cell window and pay for it with an app on an illegally held phone.

The prison drug trade is a fantastic opportunity for organised crime. Dealers have access to a literally captive audience, huge demand from a bored and depressed customer base, and face minimal resistance from totally inadequate security. In one prison, HMP Hindley, 75 per cent of those randomly screened for drugs tested positive. In many places over half of those tested are on illegal drugs.

The debt and competition that comes with illicit drugs fuels much of the appalling violence in our jails. The brutality this leads to against prisoners and staff makes rehabilitation a mere fantasy. We need more ways to help drugs get into these places like a hole in the head.

Before the blueprints leaked, drug dealers already had a birdseye Google Maps view of prisons, but they wouldn’t necessarily have been able to work out the precise location of certain cells. The prison schematics mean suppliers have a far more accurate way of planning the delivery of contraband. And let’s be clear, if a drone payload can take up to three kilos of drugs into prison it can take the same amount in explosives or weapon parts.

This is, at the very best, another embarrassing security lapse which will need thorough and urgent investigation. HMPPS has an information-security policy framework that requires a serious incident involving an IT security breach to be reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which has the power to investigate, fine or make enforcement notices on public bodies. Let’s hope it does so, because HMPPS is not an organisation that can be trusted to mark its own homework on something so potentially serious.

More pressing is finding out how this sensitive security information came to be leaked on to the dark web. Was it simple incompetence? Was it corruption? The idea that an official in charge of information of use to organised crime or even terrorists deliberately leaked this information, possibly for personal gain, doesn’t bear thinking about.

This is just the latest in a long line of awful security failures in what is one of the country’s biggest law-enforcement agencies. Undercover reporters have gained jobs in insecure prisons with no vetting. An officer was recently filmed having sex with an inmate at beleaguered HMP Wandsworth where, months before, a prisoner escaped from custody clinging to the underside of a van.

The chief inspector of prisons produces report after report waving the red flag to ministers about anarchic and filthy institutions with too few front-line staff to guarantee safety and security, let alone rehabilitation. Many of the problems identified have nothing whatsoever to do with ‘overcrowding’, that rhetorical shield that ministers and their hapless senior officials seem to drag everywhere as cover. And it looks like this latest security breach has nothing to do with Britain having ‘too many’ prisoners, either.

Institutional incompetence, not cell space, is the far bigger problem in our prisons.

Ian Acheson is a former prison governor. He was also director of community safety at the Home Office.